Whispers of Prayer

Mar 4

During the season of Epiphany, our worship pattern changed ever so slightly. It might have been a change so slight that you did not actually notice it as a change since it is part of our worship that changes rather regularly - sometimes even changing weekly. And, it was not actually a wholesale change to our worship. It was simply the addition of a couple of lines that invited us to enter into our communal prayers in a slightly new way.

In the middle of the prayers of the people, we regularly pray for members of our parish, for those who are sick, and for those who have died. Through these different cycles of prayer, we are praying for those people who are known to the parish and have requested prayer for themselves or for a family member. In addition to those prayer petitions, we were also invited to add our own petitions, intercessions, and thanksgivings to these lists of prayers being offered in worship. The invitation, though small, has changed how our congregation is praying. Now, with the invitation to add our own prayers to the formal list of prayers, we are responding with whispers of prayers in the midst of our worship. We are adding to this public list of prayer requests our own concerns, our own needs, and our own thanksgivings. It has been wonderful hearing the whisper of prayer spread across the congregation each week. It has changed how we pray.

Prayer is one of the most important things we do as Christians. It is essential to who we are as a people following the ways of Jesus. Time and again throughout the Gospels, Jesus seeks places to be alone and to pray. When we pray, we are following in the model that Jesus gave to us to connect with the Triune God in our own lives, and like Jesus, we are invited to bring into our prayers the big questions, the big worries, the big concerns. We are invited to trust God with those questions and hurdles that weigh most on our hearts.

Here, it might be helpful for us to think about what it means to trust God with these things that are weighing on our hearts. Is putting those requests into prayer - spoken or silent - doing anything other than voicing what God already knows? And, if God already knows the things that are happening in our lives and in the lives of our loved ones, our neighbors, in the stranger across the world from us, is it actually important for me to bring those things into my own prayers by naming them specifically and with intention?

I suppose here it needs to begin with what we think is happening prayer. If we believe that God already knows all things, it does seem rather redundant to name the very things that God already knows, but it is less redundant if we are able to think about prayer as the conversation I am having with God about a certain thing or person or place. While God may already know the things that I am bringing to prayer, I am trusting God with them in the act of naming them with intention. I am trusting that God not only will hold the prayers gently in God’s hands but also that God will hold me gently in God’s hands. It is an act of faith that I will encounter a God that desires to hear about those things that are weighing on my heart. I will encounter a God that is ready to cradle me in the gentleness of grace as I reflect on the very things that have been burdening me for some period of time. It is an act of love through which I am utterly vulnerable.

The whispers of prayer that float across the nave on a Sunday morning are practices of the very vulnerability that God invites from us when we enter into relationship with God. As those whispers float across our prayers, we are surrounded by holy utterances as we turn in hope towards God’s love and as we let our prayers rise up to God as incense. (Ps 141:2a) We are encouraged in the ways of vulnerability not only with God but also with each other as we offer our prayers in worship and as we whisper our hope as part of our sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving. We are invited ever deeper into our relationship with the Divine. We are invited into hope.

The hope we practice is the very hope that St. Paul tells us does not disappoint. It is a hope that transcends and is able to move mountains. Our prayers of hope are but one of the ways that we are transformed in and through Christ as we encounter grace upon grace. And it seems terribly important to remember this about prayer today. It seems terribly important to remember that prayer is one of the fundamental things we do as Christians, and it seems terribly important to remember that prayer transforms the world in which we live.

And so, in a world that is torn by strife, by war, by hunger, and by injustice, we are invited, time and again, to turn to God in prayer. We are invited forward in our Lenten disciplines to commune with God in prayer and to allow the lifting of our hands to be the evening sacrifice (Ps 141:2b). Though we may not ever know the ripple effects of our prayers, we can trust that there is one and that the world will be changed precisely because we took time to commune with God and to offer to God prayers for ourselves, for our neighbors, for the world.

And perhaps this is where making our prayers even bigger plays a role in the life of the world. In taking up our cross to follow Jesus, we are following in the way of someone who is teaching us to live for the world, to live for those who are connected to us though we may not know each individual on a personal level. We are taking up our cross to follow Jesus into the transforming power of grace, and we are becoming part of the very transformation that Christ offers to the world through his life, death, and resurrection.

We are in a moment in which the world can benefit from our practices of prayer. We are in a moment in which the world needs to know that there is another way of being with one another. We are in a moment in which the practice of prayer becomes the incense that flows through the cosmos to life changing effect. And so, we are invited to slow down, to spend time with God, and to know the love of God even more fully. Lent is inviting us to be transformed, and Lent is inviting us into the work of transformation through the grace of Christ.

May we, like the psalmist writes,